Deduction from if-then personality signatures

Personality signatures are sets of if-then rules describing how a given person would feel or act in a specific situation. These rules can be used as the major premise of a deductive argument, but they are mostly processed for social cognition purposes; and this common usage is likely to leak into the way they are processed in a deductive reasoning context. It is hypothesised that agreement with a Modus Ponens argument featuring a personality signature as its major premise is affected by the reasoner's own propensity to display this personality signature. To test this prediction, Modus Ponens arguments were constructed from conditionally phrased items extracted from available personality scales. This allowed recording of (a) agreement with the conclusion of these arguments, and (b) the reasoner's propensity to display the personality signature, using as a proxy this reasoner's score on the personality scale without the items used in the argument. Three experiments (N = 256, N = 318, N = 298) applied this procedure to Fairness, Responsive Joy, and Self-Control. These experiments yielded very comparable effects, establishing that a reasoner's propensity to display a given personality signature determines this reasoner's agreement with the conclusion of a Modus Ponens argument featuring the personality signature.     

The effect of noun phrase type on working memory saturation during sentence comprehension

Double centre-embedded structures such as “the rat the cat the boy chased ate was brown” seem ungrammatical to many human subjects. Using an offline complexity judgement task, Gibson and Thomas (1999) demonstrated that people found such sentences no more difficult to understand when the second verb phrase (VP) was omitted, relative to a condition where all the required VPs were present. According to the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT; Gibson, 1998), this syntactic illusion is determined by the high working memory cost associated with the integration of the second VP. This cost could be reduced by replacing the third noun phrase (the boy) by a pronoun, making the reader more sensitive to the omission of the second VP. This hypothesis was tested in two experiments using French sentences. Both experiments confirmed the syntactic illusion when the second VP was not a pronoun. The second experiment measured the reading times of the VPs and showed that the pronoun induced a longer reading time of the final VP when the second VP was omitted. The overall results indicate a condition under which human subjects could process the most complex part of a sentence with more than one embedded relative clause. The overall results are consistent with most of the hypotheses derived from the SPLT although offline complexity judgements could not be the most sensitive measure to test some of these hypotheses.     

Psychological Contracts and Their Implications for Job Outcomes: A Social Exchange View

This article explores the relationship between on the 1 hand psychological contract fulfilment and affective commitment and on the other hand, normative commitment and job satisfaction. We hypothesized that the perceived supervisor support (PSS) and the perceived organizational support (POS) mediate the relationship between the fulfilment of the psychological contract, commitment and job satisfaction. The sample consists in 337 soldiers in training. In order to test our model, we used 3 measures of psychological contract fulfilment (economic, socioemotional and developmental), PSS and POS measures as well as attitudes. Results show that the developmental psychological contract is related to affective and normative organizational commitment and job satisfaction whereas socioemotional fulfilment is unrelated to affective commitment. Psychological contract fulfilment has a greater impact on normative commitment than affective commitment. Results show also that only PSS plays a mediating role in psychological contract processes. Several implications emerge from this study. First, in a military context, it is important to strengthen the developmental psychological contract. Second, it is essential for organizations to place greater emphasis on encouraging supervisors to establish healthy working relationships with newcomers.     

Impact of cognitive profile on social functioning in prepubescent females with Turner syndrome

Social deficits are prevalent in Turner syndrome (TS); however, the extent to which these difficulties are secondary to characteristic cognitive impairments is not well known. Here, we sought to establish the relative contribution of executive functions, visuospatial abilities, and IQ to social difficulties in young girls with TS. Forty TS girls and 19 typically developing (TD) children were assessed with the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), the Motor-Free Visual Spatial Test (MVPT-3), the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF), and an IQ test. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted with the SRS subscales as outcome variables. In a first step, the cognitive factors were entered (verbal IQ, BRIEF global score, MVPT-3, and age), followed by the group variable in a second step. In comparison to TD, TS participants were significantly impaired on all main measures. All six regression models with the SRS subscales were significant and revealed that global executive functions explained the largest portion of the variance on all subscales and the total score. Even after controlling for cognitive elements, the group factor still explained a significant portion of the variance of the Social Cognition, Social Awareness, and Autistic Mannerisms subscales. In contrast, the group factor was not a significant predictor of Social Motivation and Social Communication scores. These results suggest that executive dysfunctions play a role in social impairments encountered in TS, but also that some specific aspects of social behavior are altered beyond what can be attributed to cognitive difficulties in this population.     

Response to Comment: Starting to Solve the Method Puzzle in Salesperson Self-Report Evaluations

This response addresses the comments of Sharma, Rich, and Levy (2004) about the generalizability of the performance effect. The comments are addressed by bringing additional theoretical and empirical support with a new study that replicates and extends the results of our 2003 paper. Results confirm our 2003 findings that bottom performers overestimate and that top performers underestimate their job performance. Further, results confirm our 2003 findings that bottom performers are significantly more inaccurate than top salespeople in their performance estimation. Finally, this study extends previous research by providing evidence that the inaccuracy in self-evaluations is reduced when factualbased questions are used.     

A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Managerial Ratings and Self-Evaluations

The purpose of this study was to examine the equivalence of self-reports and managerial ratings of salesperson job performance. A meta-analysis showed that the two measures exhibited low convergent validity (mean corrected correlation = 0.19), which indicated that they are not interchangeable. The predictive validity of self-reports and managerial ratings was compared. Managerial ratings had a corrected mean correlation of 0.44 with objective performance, whereas the corrected mean correlation between self-reports and objective measures was 0.34. Further meta-analytic investigations showed that the divergence between self-reports and managerial ratings was attributable to the performance effect. A discussion of the findings and avenues for further research are also provided.     

Religious Coping and Psychological and Behavioral Adjustment After Hurricane Katrina

Positive and negative religious coping are related to positive and negative psychological adjustment, respectively. The current study examined the relation between religious coping and PTSD, major depression, quality of life, and substance use among residents residing in Mississippi at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Results indicated that negative religious coping was positively associated with major depression and poorer quality of life and positive religious coping was negatively associated with PTSD, depression, poorer quality of life, and increased alcohol use. These results suggest that mental health providers should be mindful of the role of religious coping after traumatic events such as natural disasters.